UCLA Child Care Services NEWSLETTER

Hap Palmer:
Doin' What Comes Naturally

When hap Palmer played guitar for the retarded children in his special education classes, he got impatient; his students wouldn't sit quietly and listen - they got up and danced. Seventeen years and many albums later, he continues to encourage children to do what comes naturally. In a series of half-hour sessions this summer, the four- and five-year-olds at UCLA Child Care Services crawled under sticks, hopped over hoops and froze into statuary with the guidance and music of Hap Palmer, teacher, musician, dancer and composer of over thirty children's recordings.
     "The goal at the beginning," Palmer says, "is to have fun." Easily seen, as half a dozen giggling children try to navigate around (or over or under) a new-fallen "tree," make their most unusual shapes" (resulting in Greco-Roman wrestlers and hunch-backed frogs), or wiggle their fingers about their necks, shoulders, heads Á and knees while Palmer noodles on his clarinet.
     All this fun has a serious aim, emphasizes Palmer, who recently received his M.A. in Dance from UCLA. Besides the children's obvious delight, they learn to enjoy music and how their bodies move with music, and that not all movement is competitive. It is one of Palmer's goals to establish a "movement vocabulary," a way to connect a world of imagery to a vocabulary. This lexicon includes: actions - walk, run, twist, bend, shake; spatial knowledge - up, down, far, near; learning body parts; and discerning movement qualities - fast, slow, light, heavy, tense, loose.
     The benefits for the children? It improves their understanding of language and its relationship to music, enhances their creativity and expands their movement possibilities. Coordination and motor skills are strengthened; by the age of eight or nine, children will then have enough general "movement knowledge" to make a more specific activity choice - ballet or baseball, hockey or gymnastics.
     After an energetic session of jumping, laughing and "tree" -felling, the unanimous reply to the question, "What did you like best?" was a shrug of the shoulders and an excited, "Everything I liked best!"

UCLA Child Care Services Newsletter VOL. III, NO. 2 Fall 1985